


something of a sacrament

by Kairach



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King, Saturday Night Live, Saturday Night Live Sketches, Weekend Update (SNL)
Genre: M/M, One Shot, Post-Canon, Recovery, but then it turns out to be the best thing you've written all month?, yall ever write a crack ship as a joke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24019288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kairach/pseuds/Kairach
Summary: It didn't take a doctor to tell him that he was just barely crawling his way out of a world-defining loss.
Relationships: Seth Meyers/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	something of a sacrament

'Post-Eddie' was a fun way to phrase it. Not 'Post-Deadlights' or 'Post-Killer Clown'. Not 'Post-Remembering Your Batshit Insane Childhood and Dealing with the Pandora's Box of Consequences That Ensued'. Post Eddie. That would be the name for everything that happened in his life thereafter. Every trial and tribulation would be defined by the absence of Eddie.

Richie didn't need a doctor to tell him that he was just barely crawling his way out of the worst part of a world-defining loss. The pamphlets told him that the first few years are... tough, to say the least. He coped immediately after coming back from Derry by buying contacts, cutting his hair short, and losing a little weight. He was fine, he was fine. He just hated to recognize himself in the mirror, is all. He hated seeing this walking, talking emblem of defeat- the mere appearance of its reflection bringing about a whole slew of experiences Richie would rather never have to think about ever again. So he changed. And drank, but that's neither here nor there. And he still kept the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 _mess_ of a shirt, although he didn't know anyone who would think of this as much of a consolation. Buying a whole new wardrobe felt like a step too far, for some reason.

He meets an up-and-coming comedian who's on this thing called 'Weekend Update'. The guy explains to him over a few drinks that it's a fake news broadcast, with guests and stuff. It was a post-college project that he made with his buddies, and you'd _love_ it Richie, I _swear_ it's funny.

There was something pure about him, somehow. Not in the virginal way, that concept had always kind of disgusted (haunted) Richie for years. But this guy felt... above everything, in a way. Just happy to be with anyone, without malice or jealousy. A purity in manner, Richie supposed, not quite listening to what he was saying, but instead watching the way he tilted his glass, and how the glass caught the light of the drinks cabinet behind them.

And in the hapless, charming laugh that bubbles to the surface over the evenings and lunches and day trips they spent together, Richie felt something deep within the recesses of his heart twinge.

Oh.

"You have a fucking _terrible_ taste in shirts, buddy."

He's that way with everyone, Richie reasoned. The feeling that he's pleasantly in love with whoever he talks to. The one content to watch admiringly on while things just _happened_ around him, within his orbit. He watched him do the same routine in the cellar of some shithole bar, the hastily scrawled 'Weekend Update' sign taped to the front of an old table that threatened to collapse at any minute, while one of the 'guests' rattled jokes off to this coy, pseudo-fictional anchorman. He was wearing a forty dollar suit, and a tie he borrowed off and old wedding outfit that he had promised to give back to him, but Richie hoped he would keep as a memento.

Richie felt like one of the guests, sometimes. That was the only reason he could think of as to why this guy continued to speak to him. Why he looked at him like he was such a novelty.

Being reminded of Eddie was something Richie tended to avoid. It manifested itself in dumb ways. Like how some time in the early days, he once had to get off at the next stop on a bus because someone had used an inhaler next to him. He remembered staring at the pavement, determined not to cry, hearing the roar of the city around him as he tried to get his breath back. He tried recounting this to Bev on the phone immediately after, tried to put a comedic spin on it- it was stupid, after all- although all he seemed to get was pity, and so he quickly changed the subject.

But there was something sharp to Seth. The cadence of their conversation, the jokes hitting off each other and laughing so hard that they're slapping the other's arm in some secluded corner of a bar or museum or wherever else they had wanted to exist together, too breathless to speak. It felt just like how Eddie would talk to him. Seth was far too nice to say the things Eddie would dare to, but it was good to be back in the dynamic of a joke followed by an immediate, usually funnier rebuff. It was pleasantly familiar, to be reminded of Eddie, without getting what Richie could only assume was the phantom-pain of getting impaled.

Recovery came in peaks and troughs- that was what Richie had been told countless of times by health professionals and distant relatives and perfect acquaintances. It still took him by surprise though. A dull shock that hit him like a train when he could almost _see_ the lost love of his life, pale in the morning glow and standing on the other side of his room when Richie had barely rubbed the sleep out of his eyes; sometimes with a bright crimson stain blooming across his chest like in paintings of a nameless, martyred saint.

(the stagelights remind him of staring back into the deadlights).

He's not there, of course. Richie couldn't see him, but he felt his presence nonetheless, and his mind did the rest of the work. He used to wake up from these episodes, shivering and feverish, entombed within the walls of his apartment that, in the panic of waking up, looked unfamiliar to him.

He could never quite predict the slow, quiet creep of a 'black period': the arrival of Eddie, ever-present but brought to the forefront of his mind like a flag bearer to herald a feeling that wouldn't go away for days or weeks or months. The days and weeks and months when Richie couldn't get out of bed, couldn't think because of the greywater filling his head, filling his insides, a nameless, heavy sense of dread weighing him down, floating just above his chest but somehow pressing _down._ And when he moved his limbs, willed himself to do _something,_ to break out of the fog, he felt as if he was piloting a corpse.

Perhaps he was. In phases like that, it didn't seem so reckless to assume that Trashmouth Tozier never left the network of sewers buried underneath Neibolt Street, the death rattle of some hapless risk analyst that Richie may never speak of out loud again in his ear, the love of his life, his hand dragging down Richie's arm in a desperate effort to hold _on._

He fucking despised himself when Seth saw that part of him one day, when he thought he was holding it together, despite everything. It was the alcohol, he guessed. There must have been something that acted as a catalyst, why such a pleasant evening had transpired into a raw, loathing, shouting, throwing-shit betrayal of his own feelings. Seth was silent throughout the whole outburst. Richie's voice was so thick with crying that he could barely get the words out, couldn't see anything for the tears and these stupid _fucking_ contacts, and all he could feel was an ocean of shame lapping at his insides and threatening to pull him under into the miry dark he had clawed himself out of. 

Seth kissed him at that point. Which was a break in routine, to say the least.

To feel someone thread their hand through his hair, and tilt his head gently, ever so gently upwards to kiss him. He had forgotten what it was like to not feel lonely, if only for a few seconds. It was to get him out of his train of thought, but to Richie it felt like something of a sacrament. A soft kind of kiss, as if afraid of scaring him away. It was an admission to feel such grief, to experience so much loneliness in such a relatively short amount of time. He knew it wasn't a declaration of romance.

After that event though: that collapse of all restraint and the ensued crying and apologizing and _relief_ , a high and keen catharsis like pulling a knife out of a wound- Richie couldn't help but wonder if such a declaration would surface.

He was something of a talisman, this friend of his. He could feel him smiling in the darkened audience of his stand-up sets, once he found the courage to do them again. He began to judge his jokes based on whether he could hear his dumb, trying-not-to-laugh kind of laughter, rather than how loud the rest of the audience was. He started looking after himself more without ever really knowing why. It was a slow process with a myriad of setbacks, but after that night, it felt easier somehow. Like the better version of himself was now an actually meaningful goal to work towards.

And he could feel something changing- something _was_ happening. Every time he looked at him, grinning in the sunlight like a better, happier St. Sebastian in one of his shirts that were 'a complete fucking eyesore, you should be _glad_ I've stolen it, really', with his hand in his, he could feel something that, if not hope, was something closely akin to it. Like a beam of sunlight hitting a... oh, Richie didn't know, he was _terrible_ at similes.

"No, go on! I like listening to you." Seth said encouragingly.

"It's like... you know when you're driving back home from somewhere, and you're kinda depressed, but then suddenly a cloud will move and the sun will set the whole sky on fire? It may not last- I mean, _nothing's_ gonna last. But for a moment the whole world comes to. Proves it lives, it lives, it lives." He paused, letting his thoughts organize themselves before his audience. "And- you don't want it to ever stop. It's what you've come for. It's what you'll _always_ come back for. Nothing stays, but... you'll remember that it felt like nothing else you've ever felt before."

Or something he felt that also didn't last.

"Like everything's gonna be ok?"

"Yeah." His cheeks hurt from smiling, an unfamiliar pain that he wanted to feel every single day of his life. Richie nodded, and for the first time in years, he meant it. "Yeah. Everything is gonna be ok."


End file.
